Pinterest Offers New Tool for Searching Through ‘Pins’

Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann at an event at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco.

Douglas MacMillan for The Wall Street Journal

Pinterest, the online-scrapbooking service, is borrowing a page from Google.

The company unveiled a new tool to help users search through the recipes, travel photos and other items of interest that users designate with indicators it calls pins. Its new “guided search” feature is available now on Pinterest’s mobile apps and will be added to its website in the coming weeks, Chief Executive Ben Silbermann said at an event today at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco.

Pinterest aspires to become an alternative to traditional search engines like Google and Microsoft’s Bing, with users searching for specific products or photos rather than Web pages. Silbermann, a former Google employee, said that Web search is frequently a “let down” for users because it can be difficult to wade through the pages of hyperlinks and advertisements.

Pinterest has 30 billion pins, which are sorted into categories such as fashion and cooking. The new search engine produces a page of images based on the keyword a user enters, such as “hairstyles,” and then prompts them to refine the search with more specific categories like “beehive” or “bangs.”

Getting more users searching for pins could eventually help Pinterest sell ads. This year, the company began selling its first ads, some of which appear next to search results.